Astronomers have just added another 65 confirmed exoplanets to its Exoplanet Archive US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)bringing the total to 5,000, according to the service’s Jet Laboratory (JPL) in California.
This is an important milestone, as the rate of discovery of various species of planets outside our solar system is constantly increasing and is certainly expected to accelerate further in the coming years, as new large terrestrial and space telescopes will start operating. Most notable is NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope, which is already in orbit and is currently being tested, as well as the ground-based Giant Magellanic Telescope and Ultra Large Telescope (ELT) in Chile.
“The 5,000 planets that have been found so far include small rocky worlds such as Earth, gas giants larger than Jupiter and” hot Jupiter “in terribly close orbits around their stars. “There are also ‘super-Earths’, which are probably rocky worlds bigger than ours, smaller versions of our Poseidon and planets orbiting two stars at the same time, but also planets that persistently revolve around collapsing remnants of dead stars.” , according to JPL scientists.
The NASA Exoplanet Archive is located at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and for a planet to be included, its existence must first have been independently confirmed by two different scientific methods, as well as published in a peer-reviewed journal.
The first two exoplanets were discovered in 1992 around a rotating neutron star (pulsar), while the first planet around a Sun-like star, a hot gas giant, was found in 1995. Of the 5,000 confirmed, 4,900 are at a distance. up to a few thousand light years from Earth. 35% of the 5,000 exoplanets are the size of Poseidon and Uranus (usually icy worlds and less often warm), 31% belong to the super-Earth category, probably rocky worlds the size of Earth and Poseidon (such planets do not exist in our solar system), 30% are gas giants the size of Jupiter and Saturn (which may be hotter than the Sun), while 4% are small rocky planets that have similarities to Earth in size and their composition.
“If you think we’re 30,000 light-years away from the center of our galaxy, that means there are many more planets in our galaxy that have not yet been found, around 100 to 200 billion,” said Jesse Christiansen , an unthinkable number “.
Most of the exoplanets (over 2,700) were discovered with the American Kepler Space Telescope, which operated between 2009 and 2018. Of the terrestrial telescopes “exoplanet hunters”, the performance of the HARPS instrument of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) is remarkable. , which has found more than 150 planets.
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